President Obama
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According to the April 13, 2011 New York Times, the cuts in military spending proposed by both President Obama's budget plan and Paul Ryan's Republican budget plan add up to approximately 400 billion dollars over 12 years. Compare this amount with the nearly one trillion dollars in cuts over 10 years proposed in 2010 by the bipartisan Sustainable Defense Task Force and you will see just how insufficient these proposals are.
I often hear people say, "at least they are finally looking at some military reductions." And these people are correct, but the emphasis here should be placed on least. Instead, we should be making vastly greater cuts in military spending, rather than sacrificing vital social programs. Furthermore, as Bertram Gross argued in 1980, the heavy defense expenditure resulting from ongoing limited war since the end of World War II has become "sort of a buffer or balance wheel in the economy" providing additional protection against depression. (Friendly Fascism, p.154) Put another way, the military has become our permanent, inefficient, jobs program. As I have argued many times in this blog, the United States must prudently, but quickly, transition a much greater portion of the military budget into investments in sustainable technologies in order to help wean ourselves from fossil fuel dependence and reduce the risk of future wars.
Since the crash of 2008, we have been experiencing even more of the same economic policy that Gross described three decades ago:
To cure stagnation or recession, there are two patent medicines. The first is more Big Welfare for Big Business - through more reductions in capital gains taxes, lower taxes on corporations and the rich, more tax shelters, and, locally, more tax abatement for luxury housing and office buildings. These generous welfare payments are justified in the name of growthmanship and productivity. Little attention is given to the fact that the major growth sought is in profitability, an objective mentioned only by a few ultra-Right conservatives who still believe in straight talk. Less attention is given to the fact that the productivity sought is defined essentially as resulting from investment in capital-intensive machinery and technology that displace labor and require more fossil fuels. The second patent medicine, justified in terms of national emergencies wtih only sotto voce reference to its implications for maintaining employment, is more spending on death machines and war forces. This, in turn, spurs the growth in the federal deficit. (Friendly Fascism, p. 213)
Now that the federal deficit is dangerously high, there is a mad rush to cut it back. In doing so, the United States needs to judiciously back away from the knee-jerk corporate welfare and on-demand feeding of the national security state that has characterized the nation since the early days of the Cold War. We need to be creating jobs that will move the country, and the rest of the world, towards independence from fossil fuels. And we don't need to be doing this at the expense of lower income individuals who are already struggling to get by. The Sustainable Defense Task Force has shown the way towards far more dramatic defense spending cuts. Any effective budget plan needs to go down this path.
